portfolio of 4 sections

what do you think ?

www.aleks.webd.pl

I know that the last gallery works just in firefox...
Comments on content please.... not just on the way other windows open etc.
Whta i've seen on other forums is that people comment just the way interface works, not how it looks. Nobody really critiques the most important elements. This is not my ad for now. I am employed and just wanted to have some work samples from last years put in one url....

- The frontpage splash is silly. Just show me the site already. Why should I have to click 'enter' to see it?
- Have you considered learning HTML? That's what websites are made of...

it is the an image to provide links to forums, blogs etc... tere is no other way than just to ignore that kind of comment. I am an author of the content and site was prepared according to my interface design by my friend in one day.

Ugh! TOO many clicks to get to the content!

Like spinal007 said, loose the splash page.

Why are you using an imagemap on that second page!??!

And I've been there 2 times already and I still don't know what this site is about?!

Everything is images, you won't get good ranking with that. Search engines will have a very hard time finding you.

right, i had a big problem with search engines... now it works good... i am not a webdesigner... attaching images to the blog was not good enough to find a job... that worked as I wanted. thanks for the clicking comment... i'll try to repair that with few menu changes.

heehhhh. what expect the images do you suggest for an architect? :D

Ok.. only looked in the first gallery but the photo quality is so poor on some of the pictures that I had no idea what I was looking at.

Doubtful if you will get hired with those photos. Also some of the other ones are so heavily shadowed with poor lighting that it's hard to tell what part is actual wood and what is shadow.

You need to hire someone!

the model's photos were done a long time ago on a crappy kodak camera when I had no money fo better equipment. so I had just the scans of that and because I havent been preparing any timber models recently i decided to choose very contrasted photoshop monochromes.
Having a good camera for shooting the flowers is great idea indeed... bravo

chcek the rest linda

The other galleries do have better photos in them. Glad I check the rest.

They are rendered images produced in 3D studio max... not photos...

You can ignore my input if you want, it's up to you, but I'll elaborate:

3 people looked at your site (karinne, linda and myself)
- 3 people didn't know what it was about.
- 2 people specifically said it's annoying to have a pointless splash page before you can see the actual website. Why is it there? what does it do? What does it tell me? NOTHING.

The internet is a fast paced world. A visitor will make up their mind about your website in seconds, and in the first 20 seconds of looking at your site I didn't know what it was about. 99% of web-users will not waste their time trying to work it out. This might sound harsh, but I guarantee you do this with other websites...

Now look at the top 5 websites on this search and try to see the difference:
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en...tfolio&spell=1

If you want to make websites, you'll have to learn how to be critical of your own work. You're making it for an audience and they're the ones you have to please.

thanks for your comment... i am not a webdesigner... that's the first thing
i'll replace the image with the intro some day maybe but for now that gives information about what's inside.... portfolio of... my name
i see the tendency to avoid animated intros so maybe i'll use your advice.

i started the thread with some request and the ignoring part was just a reaction.

for the second time - i am not a webdesigner :] and asked for the comment on the content

cheeers

But we are web designers, we aren't architects/artists... so I don't think we are in a position to accurately critique the content.
Cheers

Hmmm ... yeah ... like Lchad said, since this is a Web Design and Development forum, the people critiquing your site are web designers or web developers ... we critique on design and code ... not content. Who are we to judge someone's content!?

And that's what you are not understanding... I am critiquing your content.

'content' is the information I draw from the website. As soon as I hit your frontpage, I did not draw enough information from the website to justify me looking any further. It wasn't clear what the website was about.

Have you looked at these other interior design portfolios?

This page (http://www.anneleardesign.com/html/i...portfolio.html) for example:
- Clear website name/logo
- An example of their work
- A short description/intro
- Links to other parts of the website - ie.: simple navigation
- Contact email
...all that is information which I was able to retrieve from the page with ease.

See where I'm going?

function of the site is fine. i know what you mean. But i dont like this portfolio. functional doesn't mean nice and that is definetly an example. according to your wrong way of interpretation ot the word "content" just see how ugly some of the interiors are there. I am rather an architectonic interiors supporter. And i think i just started the actual content discussion of someone's professional portfolio with nothing special . Do you finally get it?
Conclusion...and thank you for that .... portfolio should be fast and clear no matter if it's ugly, non charateristic and full of kitsch.

Any site can be both functional and attractive, there is not some law that states a site must one or the other. You poseted on a web design and ev forum, what did you expect.

Here's my critique:

First impression was one of confusion, I didn't know what the ppurpose was. I worked that out after a little while. The design is poor in my opinion, design is meant to communicate with the user, this communicates very little. Then upon clicking I am confronted with barely anything, no description of your work, no titles, not dates, nothing. Then I have to click tuiny thumbnails which resize on hover. This has usability issues. If I, on hovering, decide to hover over the image to the right of the one I currently have selected then I will find this a problem. This should be rectified. I then tried to use the back button but realised I couldn't, this left me a little confused for a moment until I reaslised what had happened. I have been using the internet since they brought out 28.8kbps speeds and have been using computers for even longer. If this threw me, even if only briefly, what about people who are less web savvy? They would be left feeling very confused. It should be a pleasure to browse a portfolio, your work isn't bad by any means but I didn't enjoy the experience.

That is the issue here: the experience. Good web design is not just about making somethig look pretty, it is about how it all fits together, how the user interacts with it. It is about making sure that it looks good; that the content is easy to get at; that no matter who views your site, whether they are an experienced web user, just bought a computer, disabled in some way, don't have much time on their hands, they can still enjoy your site and absorb the information that is there. There is no information on your site and it certainly doesn't feature an intuitive design. I would go back to drawing board with this.

The web is not print, you do not control how a user views your site and there are certain allowances that need to be made. I would encourage you to look into these before you go any further.

Final point is branding. You don't have any really or if you do it is very poor. If you were to ask me what your brand image is then I would say it is white, that's it. No logo, which is very important for any brand identity; no colour, even though this is not strictly necessary. I was left cold and so will others be, you need to pack a visual punch. You are a designer of sorts by trade, an artist. Your site doesn't look artistic or cutting edge or exciting, it just looks bland.

Pete.

thanks pete.... i think i need to learn some html dreamweaver and flash to control the background of what i am showing... not just suggest the design and use my friends basic html and dream... knowledge to put it in the web...

ok, I will say no more on this discussion, but I'll leave you with this:

Definition of web content: Google, Wikipedia
"In information retrieval, media developed to communicate information or knowledge."

A visitor will not be able to appreciate your work if they can't understand what they're looking at. I appreciate you're an interior designer, but we're web-developers. I'd listen to you if I needed advice on decorating my new lounge, perhaps you should listen to people who make websites for a living...

spinal... u are stubborn and i like it. i am not an interior designer but architect... i liked the minimalistic form and that was the main idea... what do you think of just replacing the title page with animated logo and produce more professional menu? would that be enough...
maybe you might know why the last gallery works just in firefox....

cheers

I don't like the background being white as in #FFFFFF
off white looks nicer